Seven Urns
Subramani knows there’s no getting around phoning Coleridge’s family now that he’s dead. She tastes the sour truth of it almost the moment the call informing her of his death disconnects, right after that little click like a scolding aunt, the receiver still dangling from her left hand while she examines the garden through the kitchen window, scalding water fogging the glass and running molten over her right wrist.
Subramani never liked her husband’s family, those pompous bores, because they were so high and mighty off English books, and because once, when she was eleven and visiting their estate, Coleridge’s father scolded her for plucking mangos and chucking them at the neighbor’s cat. The father and mother are long dead, of course, but three of his siblings remain, down from the original six. Byron, the eldest, that big-necked buffalo, always drinking at the trough of his own importance. Clytemnestra, dour-faced and thin as a stalk. And Shelley, the youngest, who faded into the background of any scene as a boy and who now wheezes like a poisoned mouse at the slightest stir of wind.
Despite knowing calls must be made, Subramani putters around for hours, avoiding. First, she finishes preparing the string hoppers and prawn curry. There’s no use in letting good food go to waste. She watches the gravy come to a simmer as though the heat of her glare can cook the prawns. Their gray tails tuck into themselves, sinking into the soup of water and spice the way her children rounded off their bodies and disappeared beneath blankets or beds or tables when summer storms pelted the house.
The curry bubbles. The shrimp pinken, bright as blossoms, before soaking up the piquant gravy. She waits until they are tan with sauce to extinguish the electric flame, but she leaves the pan on the burner—Coleridge’s trick—to encourage the flavor to mature as the heat dissipates. The curry leaves release their fragrance and the gravy deepens, dark as a healing bruise. Dark like Coleridge’s face after that last interminable summer in Jaffna, the summer his father forced him onto the cricket roster for the college faculty team and his skin took on a purple cast like tamarind paste left to cool in the shade. Incidentally, that was also the color of Coleridge’s face when he danced with her on the lawn of the Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya nearly four decades ago, when their marriage was still a fresh wound. They’d been soaked through with rain like two lovers in a Bollywood film. She’d wondered if Coleridge would serenade her the way Rajesh Khanna sang to Rakhee Gulzar in the film Shehzada. Subramani had snuck out to watch that film years prior, when she was twelve, and that scene had rooted into the soft meat of her young brain. It had been late in the evening. The theater reeked of armpits and feet. A fug of smoke dimmed the screen. There was blood rushing in her veins, and there was blood trickling out of her into the thick cottonwool pad between her legs. It was, also incidentally, the day after The Mango Debacle.
Subramani watches the pan and thinks of dancing with Coleridge. How their feet sunk into the slurry of grass and mud. How the rain barreled down, plastering their clothes. How she had pressed closer to Coleridge, her eyes fixed on the steam that rose from the terraced hills, carrying away the scent of tea that sweetened the air. While they swayed, her mind had turned to the prayers she’d whispered in St. Mary’s the morning they wed, the Book of Common Prayer clasped tightly between her palms. How high could the vapor from the fields reach, she had wondered. How high could prayers reach too? Maybe high enough to condense into something pretty in the night sky—stars and comets and other shining things—but high enough to reach God’s ears? She had wished she understood more.
Even now, she longs for a feeling of certainty. There are no proper Anglican churches in Atlanta. There are no proper Anglican churches in America, actually. America has Episcopalians instead, and that’s never sat right with her. Coleridge attended an Episcopal church situated in a strip mall near their home. Services were held in a room that looked too much like a movie theater for Subramani’s tastes. She missed the windows with their glass scenes, the creaking benches, and the imposing figure of Christ looming over them. She missed the pageantry and the hymnals. The last time Coleridge dragged her along, a boy with an electric guitar accompanied the choir. How could God hear prayers over that racket? How could she ever push her prayers high enough? Maybe the Hindus got it right with their burning pyres. Maybe it’s the smoke that reaches God, just enough to sting His all-seeing eyes.
And what to do about Coleridge, now? She pictures his brown face warm with life. Will his skin appear gray in the casket? How much of him remains to be seen?
Subramani considers her own skin as she ladles the curry into a rinsed-out margarine tub for tomorrow’s lunch. Years of living in America bleached the color out of her—that warm, chestnut brown that many years ago, her not-yet-husband Coleridge commented was the same shade of tan as the dirt footpaths of his family’s orchard. It wasn’t quite a compliment, but she’d turned up her chin and tried to feel complimented nonetheless. The soil around the old Wordsworth Estate was as fertile and soft as pressed cocoa powder beneath her feet. Still, when she and Coleridge moved to America years later, Subramani kept to the air-conditioned halls of their home as much as she could, and eventually, with enough shade and age, her skin took on a cooler cast.
She seals the Country Crock tub brimming with curry, and—like a cobra revealed beneath a bed of fallen leaves—the reality that she has cooked too large a portion exposes itself, dangerous in the afternoon sunlight. Coleridge is gone. Coleridge will not eat this food she prepared with two mouths in mind. If she were a different sort, she’d pack containers for the neighbors—maybe the blond ones with the sharp-edged faces so pale and colorless she wonders if they can see right through each other. But Subramani isn’t a different sort—not like Coleridge, who would wave whenever the little ghost of a child approached the hedges searching for some lost toy.
Instead, Subramani considers the half-emptied pan and the cabinet of washed yogurt tubs and pickle jars, and she fishes out seven containers—one for each day of the week. She spoons portions from the margarine tub into the new containers. As she packs the last vessel full of prawns, an idea rears up from the ground cover of her thoughts and strikes. She’ll divide Coleridge’s body into seven parts: one for each of their children, one for each of his wretched siblings, and one final piece for herself.
Like everyone else in Jaffna, Subramani addressed Coleridge’s awful, nosed-up father by his nickname, Poetry, on account of his pretentious surname and his prominence as the sort of high caste Sri Lankan who absconded to England for university. He spent a handful of years in Cambridge pursuing vague aspirations and souring in the British damp, earning himself the new moniker upon his return to Jaffna. Coleridge’s father was referred to by a range of names tailored to expose the position of the person addressing him within his sphere of influence. Like other distant relatives drawn into close orbit, Subramani’s parents addressed him with the familial “Poetry-Anna”—a reminder to themselves and everyone else of the presence of brotherhood. He was Poetry-Maama to the nieces and nephews he frequently favored above his own children, the formal and old-fashioned Aiyah to Coleridge and his siblings, and Poetry Doctor to most everyone else. To Subramani, he was to be addressed as Poetry Uncle, an appellation reserved for the children of his close boyhood friends. It had all the sound of familial connection with none of the casual intimacy of household Tamil nor the reverence of formal address.
Poetry Uncle fell from grace after his interminably long English education. He wore his three-piece suits in the deep bottom of the hottest pit of May, when even Subramani’s father—a physician and an occasional dandy in his own right—stripped down to his sarong and sprawled indolent limbs across the veranda. That suit fanned the fires of her dislike. The suit was a barrier between her clan of respectable, hard-working Sri Lankans and those posh, high-born ditherers puttering around their decaying mansion, making a very aristocratic fuss about themselves. Even their last name rankled. Wordsworth, like the poet. Wordsworth, that old British coot, whose portrait in Subramani’s schoolbooks bore a keen resemblance to a boiled skull. All that white skin stretched tight over a naked head made her shiver, like talk about the bad magic goings-on in the jungles. Hooniyan. Perish the word and thought.
Everything about the Wordsworth clan reeked of England. The borrowed name. Those crisp biscuits the mother served, so hard they could brick a building. Their sagging grand dame of a plantation house, artfully decadent like something torn from the pages of a Gothic romance. Lace doilies covered the turned-leg tables. They filled the crystal decanters in the study with scotch instead of arrack. The tea service was silver, and the china displayed on the sideboard was Royal Crown Derby, even though most evenings the Wordsworths ate off banana leaves on the veranda floor like everyone else. Poetry Uncle even carried a walking cane sporting a silver-topped handle molded into the shape of a bloodhound. When Subramani summered with the Wordsworths, she slept in the room above Poetry Uncle’s study. The tap-tap-tap of that cane on the floorboards continued late into the night, sharp and deliberate, like a code only dead poets and drunks could decipher. Once, at the end of the Third Form school year, Coleridge swiped the cane for a fancy-dress party celebrating their matriculation. His father arrived in a fury midway through the revelry, stormed across the room, snatched back the cane, and delivered four sharp blows across Coleridge’s back with the polished handle.
Poetry Uncle’s bird-boned wife, Darling Auntie, bore him seven children. That many births should have snapped her into pieces, but there was something unkillable about her, like a spider in the dark. Still, despite her survival, a ghostly air surrounded her. Her skin was fair to the point of appearing bloodless, and her face was laced with blue veins that she powdered over with talcum. She drifted from room to room running her spindly fingers over the furniture, chilling everything she touched.
The eldest child, Byron, favored Poetry Uncle, and for this reason, Subramani found him particularly disagreeable. After Byron came Milton, who excelled at violin and disappeared to a conservatory somewhere in the Alps after he came to the age of maturity—and who ultimately died from inhaling toxic fumes in a chalet in Switzerland. He was found entangled with another man, a Swedish cello player with platinum hair and a platinum band on his ring finger. The ring was a twin to the ring cut off of Milton’s left hand and collected by Byron before The Swede petitioned for Milton’s valuables. Byron melted the band down and hired a Lebanese jeweler to fashion the metal into a cross that he gave to his daughter who then promptly lost it at band practice, thus closing the circle of grief and music. These facts could not be contained despite valiant efforts from the remaining Wordsworth clan—mainly because Subramani released these details to her circles as soon as Coleridge left for work.
Clytemnestra followed Milton in the Wordsworth hierarchy like a draft after a storm. She was a wraith of a child, pale and cold. After her came soft, dough-bodied Ophelia, who—with no regard for irony—took a few too many sleeping pills and drowned in her bathtub. Coleridge arrived next in the birth order, and Shelley snuck in eleven months after that, a blink of a child born in the middle of the night, minutes before the stroke of midnight. Last was Blake, the baby of the brood, riotous and loud and as ruthless as a bamboo cane snapping a cobra spine. He played sports and slapped backs and died quite commonly, felled by a heart attack at fifty-four.
Subramani lies awake in her empty bed, her legs straying to the left side where Coleridge slept, and she thinks of them—the dead family Coleridge has joined. For a long time, she lingers on the idea of them lined up along the veranda of their old home, watching her as she watches them. When her eyes grow hot, she turns onto her stomach and buries her face in the pillow, imagining each of them—Poetry Uncle, Darling Auntie, Milton, Ophelia, Coleridge, Blake—fading into a mist that catches on a stray current of wind, carrying them away. Then, only Coleridge remains, unblinking, eyeing her as she eyes him.
After Subramani divides the prawn curry into seven parts and resolves to do the same with what remains of Coleridge, she sits down to finish her crossword. The day moves slowly around her. Outside the bay window, her favorite crepe myrtle shivers in the wind, shedding fine red blossoms. Subramani picks herself up and meanders to the sunroom, where she dozes over a magazine. When she wakes, she brews tea that she weakens with milk. She eats a toffee from the tin Coleridge stashed above the fridge and watches a game show where children compete against their parents in a contest of knowledge. She finishes Coleridge’s laundry as the daylight dims. His worn socks get chucked in the trash. She pulls out the sweatshirt he wore on chilly nights or on weekends when he lounged around without a shower and watched old Westerns on the den TV. Subramani holds up the tatty thing and pictures his long body filling it out, chest rising and falling beneath thick cotton. She smooths her hand over the worn embroidery stitched into the shape of the Atlanta skyline, allowing herself to linger for a moment before placing it in a bin for the charity shop.
When she gets to his sarongs, she plucks one from the top—his favorite, a cool blue batik that reminds Subramani of the Jaffna seaside, worn soft and threadbare at the top after years and years of tucking and folding—and steps into the tube of fabric, drawing it up over her saree and fastening it above her breasts. Like this, she stalks downstairs, snatches the phone from its cradle, carries it to the car, and, sitting in the backseat in the dark garage, finally dials their children.
She won’t phone Coleridge’s siblings for another six days.
The morning of The Mango Debacle, Subramani had awoken on her left side with a strange restlessness that at first felt like an ill stomach and later in the day turned out to be a symptom of her first blood, which wept down her thighs and splattered onto the teak floors of the Wordsworth estate, adding injury to the day’s many insults. But that morning—before the pilfered mangos and the hissing cat and the scathing words and the wailing of her womb and the urgent call to her mother, still on holiday in Kandy and less than thrilled to rush back to Jaffna to collect her youngest daughter—a haze of half-remembered dreams and dream-stained memories lured Subramani to the window.
The texture of the thoughts felt strange in her head—tense, exciting, unnerving—like coasting down a steep hill on her bicycle or cresting a tall wave in her father’s fishing boat. Most of the details were lost to a soup of impressions—dark halls where she knocked shoulders with Coleridge, warm breath on her skin when he turned his head to apologize, that feeling in her belly like upset. The only scene she could lift out of the mess and play for herself like a film reel was a memory of Coleridge from the day before. She had stumbled across him on the veranda, shirt unbuttoned to the navel, linen short-pants rolled high up his thighs, brown fingers wrapped around a glass of lime juice sweating condensation down his arm. “Sweltering,” he’d said in English. His family always spoke English to one another, their voices low like they’d discovered a secret language that no one else could decipher.
Subramani nodded, watching his bare foot slowly turning circles. “Why do you do that?” she’d asked, pointing at his toes.
“What? This?” He sped up the rotations, like he was scribbling in the air with his feet. He lifted his shoulder and leaned his head back against the house, staring at the rafters. “My ankles get sore. I suppose it feels good. Here, you want this?” He held out the lime juice, and she nodded again, taking it from his hand and turning the rim until the imprint of his lips was as far from her mouth as she could manage. She drank the cool juice, eyebrows drawn down by the sour sting, the whole of her face and throat feeling tighter and tighter as she swallowed.
“Needs syrup,” she said, handing back the empty glass.
Coleridge had merely shrugged, careless as ever, and returned to the book he’d abandoned on the floor. Jane Eyre, of all things. Of course he would read a book she’d only ever seen assigned as a punishment at school.
This was the memory that rose from Subramani’s bed the morning of The Mango Debacle and drew her to the sun-bright window. It trailed after her like a wraith as she changed into her cotton day dress and rinsed her face. She felt drawn to the overgrown patch of weeds and fruit trees that Coleridge’s family called a garden. He would likely be toeing a ball through the dirt to appease his father, as was his custom in the morning. Subramani knew she needed to talk to him, although about what, she couldn’t quite say.
Long before she married him—long before the thought even occurred that one day they might be matched—Subramani had developed a sixth sense about Coleridge. Like the memory of her dreams and the dreams of her memories, his existence needled at her. He was not handsome in the easy way she preferred, like Rajesh Khanna or even Rajinikanth. He was too dark, too curly-haired, too heavy in the nose and narrow in the cheeks. He was a noodle of a boy, thin and long and spineless. He draped himself over sofas and chairs. Even the books he read sagged, the pages curling over. He was the sort of boy to get distracted by flowers or artwork or music on the radio. Unlike his brothers, he loathed sports. He wilted on the cricket pitch. All Subramani needed to do to laugh was picture the bat dangling from his limp fingers.
What Coleridge loved was cookery. Subramani blamed his mother. From the day he could toddle, he had clung to the end of her saree, trailing behind her while she managed the kitchen. He shelled prawns for curry and hacked open jackfruit and ground chilies for pol sambol at the large stone ammikallu in the servants’ kitchen. Most days, he took to the gardens before breakfast, pretending at sport until his father disappeared into the bottles in his study and Coleridge could join their cooks in the kitchen.
Subramani made her way down the pressed dirt path bordered by coconut husk retaining walls that fanned out in scalloped arches. The sunlight fell over her, sheer as a bridal veil. She passed the little garden of struggling English roses and the heartier garden of Chinese hibiscus. Her eyes skittered left and right, seeking out Coleridge as she circled the stone pool with its purple lotus, and as she skipped beyond the benches where Darling Auntie rested in the afternoon. Turning at the row of black palmyra marking the end of the gardens and the beginning of the mango orchards. She rested her hand on a gray trunk and called Coleridge’s name.
No answer came, and so Subramani darted over the barrier and into the grove, cutting across the neat rows. Overhead, the leaves danced. Purple shadows dappled the lane, and Subramani held out her arms and made a game of trying to grasp the strands of sunlight breaking through the leaves.
She caught sight of the cat a quarter of the way into the orchard—the neighbor’s tomcat, swollen with the morning’s conquests. It sported a collar of patchy orange fur around its neck, like a child’s poorly rendered doodle of a lion. This cat meant trouble. She’d seen it before, stalking outside the chicken coop. Coleridge made excellent chicken curry—spiced to the brink of too much and rich with marrow where his knife cracked into the bones. Subramani watched the cat, and the cat watched Subramani. She thought of that chicken curry and how much she’d like to eat it again. Wasn’t Coleridge turning fourteen soon? He was so much older, it seemed. He’d want that curry, which of course couldn’t be made if an errant tomcat murdered all the chickens, which in turn meant something must be done to prevent that potential outcome.
Subramani yelled at the cat. The cat flicked its tail, brushing her aside, and returned to its journey toward the coop on the other side of the grove. There were no stones on the path, but ahead, there was a tree with a tarp beneath it where the servants had begun to harvest the fruit. The mangos presented their ripe, red faces to her, the flesh so succulent that the slightest pressure of her fingers was enough to dent them.
She was reeling back to chuck the seventh mango at the old cat when Poetry Uncle caught her. His anger struck like lightning—fast, blinding, burning away the warm feeling of the day.
The words still follow Subramani from room to room some days. Stupid girl! Rapscallion! If you were my own, I’d cane you raw. Do you think you’re royalty? Big nose in the air like that, taking everyone’s charity. Do the Lord’s commandments not apply to you? Don’t you know your mother leaves you here because she can’t bear the sight of your pig-nosed face?
Subramani likes to think she’s done a fine job as a mother despite how her children turned out. Anand was a waste of labor pains. He spends all day cycling and all night flipping switches for carnival rides. Subramani took one look at him on his twenty-fifth birthday, when he arrived two hours late to his own party with leaves in his hair and a fifth of gin in his hands, and she wrote him off. Lailani fared better but never settled on a man. She sends the same card every Christmas, signing only her name like a celebrity pausing for a hasty autograph. Lailani moved to California for some technical job too nebulous for Subramani to make use of as social collateral and thus too difficult to remember with any specificity. When Lailani first settled there, she sent a snap of a squat, yellow-sided ranch reminiscent of those houses imprisoned by chain-link fences that circle Hartsfield airport like vultures hovering over dead possums on I-75. Subramani couldn’t bring herself to make a comment. Certainly, she never visited, though her daughter often volleyed invitations at Coleridge whenever he attempted to beckon her home.
Then there was Ranjan. True to his name, he was a delight from birth. He never cried or smashed noodles into the dining chairs. As an infant, he was silent and grave-faced, capturing Subramani’s attention with the gravitational pull of his intelligence. When Subramani’s friends came around, they took turns pricking his toes with hairpins to get a rise out of his placid body, but he never made a peep. Instead, he squeezed his eyelids shut as though affronted by the nonsense, and soon fell into sleep.
Growing up, Ranjan rode Subramani’s coattails. Ranjan was Subramani’s last try at a decent child, and she was determined to see him through to his fate—maybe a career as a physician or a footballer or a movie star. She toughened him up with quick slaps to keep him on the right path, and fed him bowls of milkrice cut into diamonds and sprinkled with shaved jaggery to lead him toward a rich life. Swept along in the intensity of Subramani’s attention, Ranjan eventually became a chatterbox, then a sportsman, then a chemist, then Director of Sales at a pharmaceutical company based in Phoenix. He was a busy man, Subramani often explained when her sisters and cousins came around, asking after his whereabouts. Busy, but always close to heart.
The morning of the funeral is boiling hot, unseasonal even for Atlanta. Subramani dabs perspiration from her upper lip with a folded napkin. She stands at the lip of the chapel entrance, AC cooling her backside while the heat rising from the concrete cooks her face.
The undertaker approaches, black-suited and round as a beetle. His voice turns to smoke in her ears. Subramani nods and the man retreats, head hunched. His polished shoes complain against the marble, and she bends to wipe a scuff mark from the floor with a wadded tissue stashed inside her saree blouse. A bee bumbles into the alcove, lighting on Subramani’s shoulder. She flicks it away, eyes on the caravan of overpriced rental cars pulling into the parking lot.
Subramani watches her in-laws descend upon the chapel like golden jackals on a chital carcass. And like jackals, they come in pairs. Clytemnestra and her son Ranjit, who is as dark as she is pale. He never speaks more than three words. Shelley and his white wife, Katherine. Their children are unsurprisingly absent. And Byron with his wide-bottomed wife, Gayathri, dressed for a performance in a black saree embellished with thick gold borders and ruby rhinestones. Then there are Byron’s children, which, like her own, come in a set of three. There’s the very fat one who fancies herself a genius and dresses like something out of an old terror flick. Subramani dubbed her Big Fright. After her, there’s the thin one who yearns to be white and plays the part, wearing inappropriately casual clothes to dress events and taking up cheerleading of all nonsense. Her nickname is Whitewash, a word that makes Subramani snicker whenever she thinks about it. And lastly there’s the boy. He puffed up for a stint playing American football in high school only to slowly deflate like a poorly tied balloon during his stay at university. Balloon emerged from his studies as an accountant with limited imagination and a respectable car. He is Subramani’s favorite, if she has to choose.
Subramani greets each of them cheek-to-cheek, professing thanks that she does not feel. Throughout the service, her eyes are drawn to them, intent on uncovering the conversations occurring behind her back. As though sensing this, they react as a collective, solemn and still. After the service—as her own family herds colleagues and church friends and members of her reading circle and schoolmates flown in from Sydney-Doha-Singapore into the reception room for refreshments—Subramani leads Coleridge’s family to the front of the room where seven urns are displayed alongside photographs of Coleridge. With each portion of ashes she hands over, a veil lifts. The room brightens. Sounds grow clearer—birdsong, clattering bangles, the air conditioner’s hum. Lilies shed orange pollen over the urns, stinging her eyes. Smells she hadn’t noticed tickle her nose. The scent of mothballs clinging to Gayathri’s saree. Clytemnestra’s sandalwood perfume. These revelations unfurl urn by urn until finally, the work is done.
How strange. How fast. Like her wedding day, the big part everyone anticipated is done in a few blinks. She chews the meat of her lip, wondering if she should have offered new vows. What a scandal that would have made! I, Subramani, release you, Coleridge, keeping only myself from this day forward, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish for all the remaining days of my life. Subramani turns her wedding band thoughtfully. Perhaps she will buy herself a ring. Something gold, of course, with Sri Lankan sapphires and rubies.
Standing beside her urn, one painted fingertip resting against the polished brass, Subramani watches the Wordsworths trail out the doors and recede into the sunlight. Outside, ignitions grumble awake. Subramani waits in the chapel beside Coleridge, bride and groom once more. Through the propped door, she watches the cars back out of their slots and rumble toward the road. She tugs down her blouse and releases a long breath. Maybe now that they’ve claimed Coleridge, the Wordsworths will stop rattling their chains.
In the kitchen with the phone dangling in her hand and news of Coleridge’s death lingering in her ears, Subramani allows herself to wonder if Coleridge will haunt her.
She slides the pan off the stove’s red eye and holds her hand above the glowing coils, feeling the heat. This tendency is a remnant of the past, a borrowed reflex from her long-dead grandmother, Ammamma Pushpavalli, who cooked over open fire and paused to warm her gnarled joints over the ember bed while the family settled around her, eating and chattering and taking little notice of her stuttering fingers. Pushpavalli—the name conjured a pretty vine wheedling into tight spaces, growing between monoliths, extending into every nook.
Her grandmother loved to tell ghost stories while she mended the girls’ sarees. In Jaffna, both vines and ghosts were omnipresent, slinking into everything and thus easy to overlook. Vines lifted walls from their floorboards. Ghosts lifted girls from their seats when they snuck into theaters to watch Indian films. Not every child grows to favor their name, but Subramani’s grandmother so thoroughly inhabited hers that even her bones bent themselves into new shapes.
Once, a few nights after Subramani’s first blood arrived, her grandmother sat with her long into the night. She told story after story—jilted lovers and strict fathers and nosy aunts all returning from the grave to pry secrets from the living. When the night lantern ran out of oil, Ammamma rose from the edge of the bed and asked, “So, what’s the boy’s name?”
Caught off guard, Subramani answered: “Coleridge.”
Subramani calls Byron first.
“Thambi,” he answers in lieu of a greeting. Little brother. “What news?”
“Anna,” she answers. Elder brother. “It’s Subramani.”
“Ah, what’s my brother done, then?” he asks.
“He walked into the street, and a truck clipped him.”
Byron laughs, the sound pounding like fists. “That elephant’s ass! Always reading something, isn’t it? I’d bet money he had his nose in a book. Alright then, where should we send something? I’ll bet he wants flowers, the hand-waver.”
“Old Magnolia Funeral Home,” Subramani says. She takes pleasure in the silence that greets her.
“Died?” Byron asks. The words come out in a huff, like he’s running up a hill.
“Yes.”
“When did it happen?”
“Last Tuesday. In the morning,” she says.
“And you waited so long?” He’s angry now. The words spew out like half-chewed betel. “He’s my brother.”
“It’s been a whirlwind, Byron,” Subramani says, turning the knife a little deeper with the use of his name.
“What, you were busy? That’s your excuse? We could have helped you. Arranged things. Gayathri will be devastated, you know. You can’t just sit on information like this, Subramani. Tell me, did you inform your family? All your sisters and cousins?”
“I need to go. The children need me, and I have much to–”
“I’ll fly down,” Byron cuts in. “Finish the arrangements for you.”
“There’s no need,” Subramani says. “Everything is done.”
“Impossible. It’s murder to get the paperwork together for international transit.”
“There’s plenty of time.”
“Listen,” Byron exhales. She hears a distant thump-rumble and imagines Byron plucking his old Dukes Royal Crown ball from its display stand and rolling it along the seams of his desk. That she may have unsettled him enough to disturb the trophy from his last cricket match, played at Cambridge alongside a cadre of pasty boys, brings Subramani quiet satisfaction.
“You know our family has traditions,” Byron continues. “I can see to it that things are handled the right way. There are logistics, and you won’t have to worry over the details. It’ll be easier on you and the children. We have the mausoleum space in Cambridge. I still have the paperwork from Milton, and I can–”
“They’re cremating him now,” she says, twirling the phone cord as she clips him off. “Today, I mean. It’s…” Subramani checks her watch. Nine after eleven. “Yes, it’s done by now.”
The line is silent for so long, she wonders if the call’s been dropped.
“You cremated him?”
“Yes,” she says.
“He wanted it?”
“I wanted it.”
“Like a Hindu?” The thump thump thump on Bryon’s end of the line resumes.
“Of course not,” Subramani says, irritated now. “Christians cremate all the time. In any case, I’m having the funeral home put aside ashes for each of you. Clytemnestra and Shelley as well. If you want to take your portion to Cambridge, then by all means, do so.”
“You’re dividing my brother into pieces,” Byron says. The thumping increases in speed.
“It’s the best way. Seven parts, an auspicious number.”
“What of a funeral? You can’t just…what? Ship us a piece of him?” The words are blunt, angry. They pound into Subramani’s head, thump thump thump, reviving an ache she’d only just tempered with aspirin.
“The funeral will be next Friday,” she says. “I’ll send something around later.”
“I wanted to see him, at least,” Byron says.
Subramani feels a quick pang, like a stitch in her side after too much running. She rubs the doughy flesh beneath her ribs until the pain dissipates, and says, “His head was smashed in, Byron. What’s there to see?”
“I don’t know,” he makes an odd sound, something between a gasp and a cough. “His hands maybe.” There’s a sound of papers shuffling and then a bang—leather on wood. Subramani hopes the ball is dented beyond repair.
In contrast to her grandmother, Subramani certainly doesn’t suit her name, which by rights should have been given to a boy. After nine daughters, her mother—morning sick into the third trimester and nursing dashed hopes for a son because of it—resolved to name the child Subramani regardless of what showed up between her legs.
Such a name to choose for a mewling girl, small and gray, born eight weeks too soon on a distracted afternoon when her mother was stepping out the door, late for a meeting that might have secured a match for her third daughter, Subramani’s sister, Rani. Her mother once told her that the labor pains arrived like gusts of wind heralding a storm. The water Subramani had swum in for those thirty-two weeks flooded out, drenching her mother’s finest silk saree. Sometimes, in the sullen corners of her childhood, Subramani wondered if it was vengeance as much as longing and laziness that brought upon her head the sort of name that was only ever extended to sons.
Subramani, the boy-god. His figure is the very distillation of boyhood. He is dear to mothers and fathers and whole villages thanks to that extra flap of meat between his legs. Subramani, that illustrious name sourced from the lengthier Subramaniam, recalling Lord Murugan, the six-faced boy of war, born of fire so hot that only Parvati could endure the flames. Son of Lord Shiva himself, sitting upon his father’s knee to paint his face with pyre ash, his father’s limbs already twitching to begin the dance that will end the world.
Subramani, the beautiful son, riding his peacock and swinging his sword.
Subramani, in the kitchen with prawn curry portioned across seven containers, resolutely not thinking about her dead husband or his wicked family. Resolutely not making phone calls. Resolutely eating the same prawns and idiyappam for a full week, meal after meal, even after the shrimp grow tough as tires. Subramani, with a hollow between her legs instead of that much-preferred tube of flesh, sitting at the kitchen table one more time to eat a plate of rubbery prawns ladled over disintegrating string hoppers, her fingertips wet with brown gravy, the phone in her line of sight but as still and as silent as the dead.
Subramani married Coleridge mostly out of convenience. It was the tail end of ’79, she had just turned nineteen, and things had started to sour in Jaffna. The brewing unrest put Subramani on edge. For weeks she’d been unsettled. She abandoned her beauty routine of kohl, rouge, and imported red lipstick bought with pocket money she snuck from her father’s wallet. Her bangles remained in their velvet boxes. The effort of socializing rankled. She felt yanked backward into childish fears, sleeping with lights on and resuming a regimen of nightly prayers. On market days, she wrapped herself in plain cotton sarees and walked haltingly, as though some phantom nipped at the end of her skirts, tugging and tugging. It was in this mood that she unraveled a spool of news about the Wordsworth clan from Jaishree Ramachandran, a top-heavy, duck-footed former classmate still gloating over her recent nuptials, while jointly bent over a basket of snake gourds. Byron Wordsworth had settled in New York, and though Subramani had never been the sort to seek out emigration—and had furthermore sworn off the Wordsworth clan entirely following The Mango Debacle—the thought occurred that it would be pleasant to live in Hollywood and avoid the messy tensions that more and more filled the Jaffna market stalls with urgent whispers. This stray thought followed Subramani home, and that night her dreams took strange turns that woke her in the middle of the night, the taste of lime in her mouth and visions of sprawling mansions in her head. The more she thought on it, the more America seemed preferable to England with its damp castles and musty halls or, God forbid, to Canada, where it seemed all of her set was headed and which she imagined to be comprised entirely of snow.
It agitated Subramani that so many good matches had been made over the summer months. Most of her batch were married off, so much so that she was running out of fine sarees to parade around town. She shuddered to consider that she might need to repeat an ensemble to the next wedding, like a Victorian merchant wife with only one chest of proper clothes.
Subramani herself, despite her admittedly piggish nose, was regarded as a top-tier beauty among her peers—lovely enough to expect at least a cricketer with one foot into medical school abroad. But her mother, exhausted from the burden of marrying off Subramani’s eight older sisters, settled on Coleridge instead. The way her sister Lakshmi tells it, their mother received the Wordsworth matriarch on a rainy Monday, and before the tea had cooled, the marriage was agreed.
Two hours later, Darling Auntie, with her frail bird bones and koyal-black hair, grasped the ball of Subramani’s shoulder and steered her and her mother into the humid Wordsworth receiving room. She pet Subramani’s head like a street dog before scuttling away to deliver the news and fetch Coleridge from his room. Poetry Uncle was conspicuously absent.
Subramani rapped the brick-hard biscuit on the corner of the coffee table, which, to her delight, turned out to be softer than the biscuit itself—the biscuit having been hardened in the Wordsworth oven hours before while the table spent years softening in the lingering tropical damp, which the very English design of the house held hostage along with the heat. The room reeked of mildew. The floorboards were soft underfoot, a peculiarity of the house that Subramani had forgotten in the seven years since she’d deigned to venture inside. Sitting in the parlor, sweat stains blooming across the teal expanse of her saree, Subramani’s mood curdled. She’d never minded Coleridge’s food, certainly, but had she liked him? Certainly not. There’d been no friendship between them—only the convenience of proximity. Memories strayed into the room and idled in the damp corners. Childhood trickery of the sort that settles under the floorboards of a person. Comments she’d resented. Pranks that stung. Stray asides with his sisters in the back garden, where the talk turned to needles jabbing into her skin.
Darling Auntie returned without Coleridge, and Subramani fought the urge to storm out in a huff. Only her own mother’s pointed stare kept her in line and silent.
“I am terribly sorry,” Darling Auntie said in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sorry at all, “but Coleridge is buried beneath piles of books, sorting them out for the trip to America. You’ll remember his affinity for books. Had we been given more notice, we could have received you more formally, of course. But I can certainly escort you upstairs.”
Subramani’s mouth opened and closed. Her arms went slack. “America?” she’d asked.
“Yes, yes,” Darling Auntie waved off. “New York. It’s not Cambridge, of course, but Byron and Gayathri opened a room for your use while Coleridge completes his studies.”
Subramani’s heart raced—whether from thrill or terror she couldn’t parse out. Words caught in her throat. She turned to her mother, who had the gall to tut and say, “You’ll have plenty of time to pack your own trunk before the ceremony.”
Minutes later, Subramani stood in the hallway outside of Coleridge’s door, flanked by her mother and his, and stared at the handle so hard she feared the metal might turn molten. Darling Auntie reached over her, skittering her fingernails over the wood—tap-tap-tap—the sound like a pecking crow, and curled her spindly fingers around the doorknob.
Coleridge stood curled over his school trunk, his long body like a dangling apostrophe abbreviating nothing at all. Before he could look up, Subramani blurted, “I want a holiday in the upcountry.”
Subramani’s mind flails toward the past at night. The sun dips low and the day with all its chores and phone calls and arrangements ends. Then Subramani is alone in the quiet. She thinks of dropping pins to hear the sound.
Seven nights she lies awake in the center of the bed, thoughts scattering in odd directions. The darkness swaddles her. She stares at the ceiling until the shadows connect into a smear of black suggestions. The bureau loses its edges. The vanity grows fuzzy and indistinct like the static between radio stations. Subramani drifts in this haze. Her mind strays toward her early years in Atlanta, when she was young and pregnant and only the heavy burden of summer felt familiar. She abandons the faces of her children, veering into the lanes of her first days as a married woman, when she roamed between tea hedges while Coleridge napped. She shivers at a brush of cool wind and listens to the plucker-women sing as they stoop over the bushes.
Eventually, she returns to the edge of childhood. Her monthly blood comes early, staining her new saree. Ammamma Pushpavalli soaks the silk in seawater and lights the night lantern. Her ghost stories stretch into infinity.
The dead Wordsworths come at night too. She fumbles through dance lessons at the upper school under Clytemnestra’s cold scrutiny. She eats too much foil-topped rich cake at her sister Lakshmi’s wedding and vomits gold leaf onto Ophelia Wordsworth’s shoes. She lifts a tin of cigarettes from Byron’s room and sneaks into the servants’ quarters with Milton and Coleridge the summer before her tenth birthday. They cough and spit, and two days later they stash the tin in Blake’s knapsack where Darling Auntie is sure to find it after he chases Subramani through the mango orchard with a mouse.
That’s as close to The Mango Debacle as Subramani will allow her mind to wander. Once she spies the orchard rising from the field of memory, she shuts her eyes and allows sleep to overcome her.
New York was not a suitable place. Much to Subramani’s dismay, Coleridge’s schooling spanned five lousy years partially buried in snow, cooped up in a house so cold that Subramani feared ice would clog her arteries and block her heart. After graduation, she nudged Coleridge away from Byron’s oversight. They landed in Atlanta in the midst of a blistering summer with two suitcases, a trunk of silk sarees, and enough gold jewelry to buy a convenience store in Marietta.
They lived out of an extended stay motel until they could find an acceptable house to rent. After one interminable Saturday morning spent traipsing from rental to rental—always the same mid-century ranch reeking of cigarettes and mold—Coleridge coaxed Subramani into a trip to the lake. They’d packed a picnic and driven an hour and a half in their swimming clothes. When they arrived at the lake, they found it overrun with pale bodies sunning shoulder to shoulder. The lake itself was a sheet of glass. Looking at it made Subramani feel sliced open.
Subramani never trusted still waters. They’re too good at concealing, too good at stewing up all the terrible things her childhood taught her to fear. Mosquitoes. Disease. Venomous creatures and creatures with teeth. Subramani never waded into lakes or ponds. She avoided puddles when it rained. If forced to choose a place to swim, she favored oceans and rivers, mountain streams and waterfalls. That day at the lake, she’d shouted at Coleridge when he waded in, drawing stares.
Years later, while discussing Memorial Day plans with her book club, the subject of that lake arose. Lake Lanier—the shape of its name in her mouth felt as though it could cut her tongue. It didn’t surprise her to discover it was haunted. Never boat there. Never swim. Zsuzsie, a Hungarian-born transplant whose accent still dragged over words, said there was an entire city beneath the water, a Black town drowned by Whites wanting more electricity to power their television sets. This image haunted Subramani’s dreams. Houses swallowed whole. Cars floating along currents like roads.
Now, Subramani thinks of the blood puddling in Coleridge’s veins and remembers those dreams of still waters consuming rooftops and fences and gravestones and sheds and dollhouses and swing sets and trucks and shrubs. Trees suffocated by cold water. Gardens deprived of light. Windows overlooking dark fathoms.
Somewhere in a cold, dark drawer, Coleridge’s body waits without a view, a lake of blood quiet in his chest, unmoving and immovable like the sunken city beneath Lake Lanier. Like the ancient irrigation tanks in Sri Lanka carved out by the brown hands of her ancestors while the English huddled in their mud huts and danced around stones.
Alone in bed for the first time in decades, the old anniversary clock chiming midnight on the downstairs mantle, Subramani lies awake wondering about all of Coleridge’s blood. She thinks about it pooling in his veins, stagnant, with nowhere left to go. Still lakes where rivers once flowed.
The morning Coleridge dies, Subramani sets up the kitchen to make a double-batch of his favorite meal—prawn curry with strings. She cuts open the cold, gray meat and angles her knife to scrape out the veins. Her mind wanders in the usual direction: a return to Sri Lanka. A week in the tea country culminating in a soiree at the Grand Hotel where she could dance and gossip and congratulate Coleridge on their forty years of marriage. They would host the party on the lawn where they danced so many years ago, their marriage still tottering on colt legs. Her sisters would tow along their husbands and children. Ranjan would gift his father a Rolex and his mother a new set of jewels. She will need to suggest the idea, she knows, but she’ll keep that detail to herself. Rubies in twenty-two karat gold would make a nice statement, she thinks. Bangles, necklace, earrings. She would wear a Western-style gown to display the journey she’s made, from Jaffna Girl to American Matriarch.
In the midst of this daydream, the phone interrupts, shrill as a cock crowing at dawn, cutting short the meandering path of her dreams. The knife slips sideways, barely missing her thumb. It clatters to the counter, a broken bell tolling.
On the line, a man named Carl repeats the story of Coleridge’s death, because while Carl was explaining, Subramani was busy thinking of calling her in-laws and thus missed the whole bit about how and when her husband died. Distantly, Subramani registers the sound of water boiling. The pot on the stove roils, ready to receive attention. Subramani watches the water, stretching the phone cord to lean over the burners. She unwinds a tangle in the coil of plastic-wrapped wires connecting receiver to cradle. How curious to consider such a thing as a phone cord, where lengths of woven metal carry sound across miles and miles under the spell of some hidden magic, connecting her with this man she can’t give her proper attention to.
“Say again, please,” Subramani says, and she catches the edge of a sigh before the man swallows the sound.
He clears his throat and starts over. His voice travels through the wires and into her ears and through the scaffolding of flesh and bone and arteries like the blood her heart is pumping, the blood echoing in her ears, sustaining her despite her lack of understanding of the mechanics. Coleridge’s heart had beat strong and certain when she listened to his chest the week prior—an incidental moment, the happenstance of a strange afternoon nap thick with memories of their childhood. His family’s mango orchard. His terrible father rapping his cane on the ground. She’d woken first, breathless and clammy, and she’d listened to Coleridge’s heart beating in his chest. It had been so solid, so steady—only slightly burdened by age, pounding and clenching and carrying on. Until three hours ago, according to this man on the phone whose words elongate as he grows quieter, softer, slower.
“Ma’am, do you have any questions for me?”
“No, no. You’ve said enough,” Subramani says, batting away a huff of steam rising from the pot. The water moves, changing and struggling like any living thing.
A truck ran over Coleridge. Subramani imagines a red-sided lorry barreling down the road, accelerating toward the intersection outside of their restaurant, Serendipity, named for Serendib, that old appellation for Sri Lanka. The Isle of Happy Accidents. The Isle of Chance Meetings and Unforeseen Outcomes. Subramani thinks that if she doesn’t sell the restaurant, she ought to at least rename it.
Three hours ago, across the nest of highways that circle Atlanta, separating her home from Serendipity, Coleridge stepped out of the embrace of kismet and onto the street while Subramani, anxious over her diseased azaleas, fussed at the yard boy pruning the bushes. She threw her hands wide in frustration, dousing the porch in tea. Hot tea, of course. None of this iced, over-sweet nonsense. Subramani only drinks orange pekoe grown and plucked and packaged in Dimbula—always brewed loose and civilized with a splash of milk to tame the bitterness. While Coleridge lay dying, Subramani had shouted and sloshed and bemoaned the loss of perfectly good tea and perfectly good shrubs, unaware of the moment when her husband’s perfectly good heart ceased beating.
Subramani pictures Coleridge wandering down the sidewalk, careless as ever, probably nose-down in some book, stepping off the curb without a spared glance until—pow! Flattened by a truck. He was heading to the market to get a feel for a new seafood supplier with a bounty of blue crab and oysters trucked up from Savannah. The way the front-of-house staff explained it to this Carl fellow, Coleridge had nodded goodbye, tugged open the glass door, traipsed ten paces down the sidewalk, and just stepped off the curb into the street. Gone, just like that.
Carl speaks soft and slow about the process for claiming the body and the papers she’ll need to sign. Had they made prior arrangements? Is there a funeral home to alert? His words are soup in Subramani’s ears, the sounds all blending together into one taste, one impression. He repeats and repeats, so slow and quiet that Subramani wants to dump the pot of boiling water on the receiver to silence him. Maybe he thinks people with accents can’t digest his words, mistaking her silence for ignorance. Or perhaps it’s the way she hadn’t listened at first, too consumed by thoughts of her husband’s disagreeable siblings to whimper or exclaim.
Carl goes on and on, and the thought occurs that maybe that’s just the way of a job like his. In America, such revelations are paced for small children. This is the American way, Subramani thinks. Expect the tantrum. Baby the ear and wait for that flash of pain smothered by anger—fast, fast, fast, big, big, big—so that the bereaved can move on to the next toy, the next task, the next pursuit of entertainment. In Sri Lanka, news of a death is delivered quickly to give space for the wailing. Grief is performance. Grief is community. When there’s death, the whole village gets in on it, shouting and writhing and ripping out hair. Women’s bodies drop to floors. Teeth gnash. Grief is spectacle and high art and a kind of sport for the old women that collect outside the churches and temples and markets, a long match of batting and fielding that extends into months.
Here in America, land of the coddled, where people cannot tolerate discomfort, Subramani allows this slow-speaking stranger to natter on, moving from the stove to the sink, the phone cord stretched nearly straight, and stands idly while the cold water runs, shushing into the sink.
“And Mrs. Wordsworth,” Carl says, his tone shifting toward an ending. “You should know your husband went very quickly. He probably never even knew it happened.”
Subramani breathes through her mouth, heavy and short. Each breath hits the receiver and echoes back to her, as though she’s not alone.
He probably never even knew it happened.
How ridiculous. How absurd.
And yet, it would be just like Coleridge to miss out on his own death.
The call disconnects. The receiver dangles from Subramani’s left hand. She lets the water run races around her wrist and down her arm while she turns the thought over in her head.
When Zsuzsie returns from Budapest six months after the funeral, she stops by with pastries, and over a cup of Ceylon tea plucked and dried in Nuwara Eliya, asks Subramani where Coleridge was buried. Subramani takes her time explaining the urns. One to Byron, destined for English soil next summer. Clytemnestra and Shelley—well, she can’t be sure. Anand took Coleridge into the mountains. They still don’t speak, but he has an Instant Gram website where Subramani saw a series of snaps showcasing his bicycle trip to a waterfall in Tennessee where he scattered his father’s ashes. Lailani sent an email that read, “Final home.—Lailani,” and included an attached JPEG showing a picture of her urn on the fireplace mantle. And Ranjan, well, he’s been busy, but he said he’d look into options. Subramani is certain he’ll come up with something significant. Maybe a trip to outer space, where Coleridge would hover for eternity, dancing from star to star.
“And what about you?” Zsuzsie asks, powdered sugar drifting from her jam-filled cookie like snow.
“I’ve been mulling it over,” Subramani says, “and I think that I’d like to go back to the beginning.”
Subramani sits on a lawn chair in Nuwara Eliya and considers the stars. The air smells of tea leaves and soil dampened by the afternoon drizzle. Upcountry perfume, Coleridge called it so many years ago, the window of their room thrown open to invite the breeze. He rests in her lap now, the brass canister cool beneath her fingers. Behind her, the Grand Hotel drifts toward sleep. One by one, the lights blink out, until there is only Subramani and the starlight and the insects’ nightsong.
She remembers an astronomy book that Ranjan carted around the winter of his fifth school year. In it, some scientist speculated on the nature of the universe. He said that all of time—past, present, future—exists all at once. If this scientist was right, then all the things that ever existed—all the moments Subramani ever experienced and all the moments she ever will experience—were happening right then and would be happening later that night and would still be happening when she awoke in the morning. She had taken a long time to understand the words, stooping over the book while Lailani chased Ranjan around the den. At first, she’d felt angry. What nonsense was this, when everyone knew that the Lord created the land and the sea and every other thing in a chronological series of miracles, one after another, day by day, in a perfect chain of cause and effect? She’d thought of chucking the book. The boy would recover. Still, later that night, as she ground cumin seeds for chicken curry, she allowed herself to accept that the idea—misguided though it may be—was quite comforting. If it was true, perhaps her mother was just there at the counter, mixing coconut milk and jaggery into red rice for pongal. Maybe she could sit with Ammamma Pushpavalli while she mended clothes or watch Ranjan take his first wobbling steps again. The idea had followed her throughout the evening and into the night, soothing something unsettled inside of her.
Now, perched on a wrought iron chair on the lawn of the Grand Hotel, Subramani thinks that maybe Ranjan’s book was onto something. She thinks maybe her whole life is present, keeping her company while she ponders the night sky.
Right now, she waits for Coleridge to walk down the hall and take her hand. Inside the hotel and inside this very same moment, they stumble through a waltz before bolting for the front garden where they will dance in the rain. Right now, Anand hands her a paper with “Amma”—his very first written word. Right now, she births Lailani in a rush of blood, breathless as the nurses swab her gray body. Breathless as her daughter begins to cry.
Here’s Ranjan in the park with her, plucking fistfuls of dandelions. Anand rests his head on her knee, his body almost long enough to span the length of the backseat.
And in this moment, on the street outside Serendipity, a truck barrels through a stoplight as Coleridge breezes out the door.
But most of all, right now, Subramani is twelve years old, running through the orchard behind the Wordsworth house. There’s a cat hectoring the chickens, but she’ll scare him straight. Chickens are the best for eating, she knows. Just like she knows that Coleridge loves the little chicks as much as he loves cooking the chickens and that cat hair makes him sneeze. The sunlight heats her skin. It shines down in white beams that tangle in the trees, the light of early morning cool and delicate, fragile as porcelain and fleeting as breath, dappling pale lace over the dirt lane. She turns her face to the sun and smiles.
